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Friday, May 20, 2011

A query for my 37 readers!

When I started this blog back in August, I originally intended it to be a general blog on old school fantasy gaming. Well, as time went on, I began to realize that my own personal interests lay elsewhere. While I enjoy the ease and expandability or old school rules and their various retro-clones, the tired and recycled Tolkien/Lewis inspired troupes bore the living hell out of me. As the posts I'm made over the last few months indicate, I crave wilder fantasy settings; from Prof. Barker's Tekumel and the related Humanspace Empires by the Drune, to Al's upcoming Warriors of the Red Planet and Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa soon to be republished using Jim Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess engine.

What's the point of my trying to maintain the facade that this is a general fantasy gaming blog when so much of my gaming interests lie elsewhere? Therefore, I'm seriously considering re-tooling, re-tasking, and even re-naming No School Like The Old School into a weird fantasy gaming blog.

My question to you is, should I do this or should I keep the site the same?

12 comments:

  1. I named my blog Rather Gamey because it was vague enough to fit my ADHD - ferret-like - look, a shiny thing on the floor - lack of attention span longer than two seconds brain functioning. I say 'old school,' but all that really means to me is that I'm old and I've seen a school before.

    I don't think the name of your blog pins you into a pigeon hole that excludes the weird stuff you just mentioned. In fact, to me it fits exactly - since in my world view, OSR should not have a three inch thick layer of dust on it - but should include new and strange ideas and energy and life and all that jazz.

    So, to sum up, follow your bliss. :)

    - Ark

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  2. Go where your muse calls you. Personally, I think the old school sci-fi/post-apoc genres still have a lot of room to grow and space to explore - if you go there or towards some kind of fusion, I see no need to even change the blog name or byline necessarily.

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  3. I agree with the other comments. Sure, change the background and layout if you feel the need, but I think otherwise, you're still fine with the name, just so long as you don't start extolling the virtues of 4e or something. ;)

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  4. +1.
    I can imagine the title of the blog would fit right in with a sci-fi font and the pictue of a four armed ape-cyborg with laser eyes...

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  5. I just became 38 in anticipation of more weird fantasy!

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  6. seems like everyone else got there before me. What's more Old School than Tekumel?

    In fact, what you're pointing to is the main thing I like about the OSR: I don't know anywhere else in the hobby that is either (a) so jazzed about the weirdness of early fantasy/SF or (b) so good with an anything goes approach. I had hopes for Steampunk back in 1990 or so but it's since become its own tight little genre: you can immediately recognise that someone's trying to be Steampunk.

    Best piece of advice I ever got from art school: don't try to make your stuff look like art.

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  7. Just throwing my hat in with the chorus of approval. Take your blog where you please and we will follow ;)

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  8. Make that 39 readers. I'll admit that The savage AfterWorld was originally intended as a general OSR resources blog, as I had just discovered LL, S&W, OSRIC, etc. But as I was laying out the blog, I stumbled across MutFut and the rest is history. Gotta go with your muse. No sense writing on something you feel you HAVE to. Write about what you WANT to write about. I agree the blog name is still appropo though.

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  9. I am not sure the title of the Blog matters. It is the content that matters. Except for catching casual searchers your readers will follow the blog if they like the content and those that follow them will eventually find you so on and so forth. Keep it the same and detractors will just stop following.

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  10. Go where your muse takes you, there's plenty of room in the old school for weird fantasy and science fantasy or science fiction or whatever else strikes your fancy.

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  11. Keep what you have and expand. I mean really, ALL rpgs are fantasy.

    As for the 'old school' to me this is the mantra:

    "To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It [is] about going back to the roots of our hobby and see what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time."

    -Rob Conley, Bat In The Attic

    That is gospel to me. OSR means at least 100 different things to 50 different people.

    You are on the right path, just walk.

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  12. Mr. Conley's quote above, as per ADD Grognard sums it all up nicely. You're doing fine. Burroughs is intrinsic to OD&D, so weird sci-fi/fantasy is at the very heart and core of the OSR. Just have fun!

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